Category Archives: TA Plays

While we were entirely too stupid for Football Manager, King's League: Odyssey is way more our pace. Arguably, the worst thing it has going for it is that it looks a lot like a free to play timer game, but in reality, it's a surprisingly deep management game where you put together a crew of knights to fightâ€¦ All sorts of things. Don't judge this book by its cover...

I feel apologies are in order for anyone who knows anything about soccer and is excited for the Football Manager series. See, we're Americans and know nothing about soccer. Or, at least, Jared and I don't. We try to play Football Manager Handheld 2014, but without any sort of tutorial it basically was a total disaster. Still, I know there are people excited for this game, so it only made sense to record some kind of footage hoping someone out there can make some sense of it...

One of my favorite things about the App Store is the weird games that leak out of it every now and again. The Rivers of Alice seems to fall squarely inside of that category, with weird interactions such as picking up random sticks floating town a river to smack some kind of worm-looking sloth to see a weird series of images that have to do with dragonflies. I'm anxious to figure it all out, but, check out our video if you want to see what I'm talking about...

Even though I spend this entire video mispronouncing the name of this game, I assure you, it didn't stop me from enjoying it. I love how game books are getting so advanced on iOS, it's crazy to think we're only a few years off of super basic dice rolling game books, and here we are with a game book that has full 3D battles. If you want to see the cool part, skip to the end of the video...

Strap in for a massive blast of videos from tonight's releases, with the first of which being Chicken Boy. We got a sniff of this game back at GDC, and are glad to finally see it released. Gameplay is a little simple, and is hard to get that excited about next to other releases tonight like Oceanhorn, but, still. These kind of games are fun time wasters...

As someone who has been looking forward to Oceanhorn for quite literally over two years now since its initial announcement, it brings me great pleasure to finally post a TA Plays of it. What you're seeing is about two hours in, well beyond all the initial tutorial stuff, and instead focusing on the first real island and dungeon you come across...

Bulkypix's just-released shooter Meltdown [$4.99] has a lot of things to love. It's got an entirely touch-based default control scheme which seems really cool, but it never seems to take me too long to just switch back to virtual controls in all these games. I think I'm just too stuck in my old ways. There's a bunch of little Borderlands nods from the way enemies are introduced to the way they barf numbers when you shoot them...

The original Sorcery! [$4.99] is not only a ton of fun, but it's also one of the best choose your own adventure experiences that I've seen on the App Store. Doing a video of what essentially amounts to an interactive book is a little boring, but it's the best way to show off how much effort has gone in to the Sorcery! games. Sure, it's cliche, but if you liked the first one, you'll love the second...

The first of tonight's many releases that we took a look at was Everplay's Miner Problem. It's another endless runner, complete with all the trimmings that make for a good runner between loads of unlockables, great pixel art, fun power ups, and more. Check out our time with it:..

The original Pocket God [$0.99] is by far the most updated game I know of on the App Store. It's pretty crazy, really, especially when you look back to what Pocket God 1.0 had compared to what it is now. Among one of the many updates to the game was one that featured a Doodle Jump [$0.99] tie-in where you could drag a pygmy up to the screen and do a super-simple jumping game. Well, that basic mini game is now a fully blown out game that I can't put down...

We loved Anomaly Warzone Earth [$3.99] when it was released, and the pseudo-sequel-y expansion Anomaly Korea [$3.99] kept that gravy train rolling with even more fantastic tower offense gameplay. Anomaly 2 gives fans of the Anomaly series even more awesome aliens to blow up, and the game is only getting more and more cinematic as it goes on. We did see some odd framerate drops on my iPad 4, but who knows if that's iOS 7 related or the result of some other weird issue that we're betting gets fixed before long...

Following a weird free, then not free release is the Kickstarter-funded Fist of Awesome [$0.99]. It's the quintessential side scrolling arcade beat 'em up homage, filled with plenty of humor that'd make any EnviroBear fan grin. We take it for a spin in this video, encompassing the first level which is basically the tutorial, and then the second bear-filled stage:..

The latest title from Crescent Moon Games is a platformer that initially seems incredibly basic, but if you stick with it, you'll be rewarded with some really neat environmental puzzles. You'll see this in our first look video, as we go from "Alright so you play a dog that can move clouds around, so what" to "Oh wow, that was really clever." The controls are a little weird, which we also talk about in the video, but they're no show stopper by any means...

It's not often that we find ourselves saying, "I'm not sure I've seen this mechanic before," but that's definitely the case with Pocket Titans. It's a tactics-centric puzzle battle game, but the way you maneuver your dudes to attack is closer to a match three where you slide rows of tiles to create matches. It's hard to explain, but if you just check out a few seconds of the video you'll see what I'm talking about...

Billed as a "psychological horror" game, I feel like in our first look we didn't even get past the shrink wrap to actually scratch the surface of the game. I'm still sort of dumbfounded that you can actually drive vehicles you come across though, as it seems like in 99% of these kind of games cars just serve as set pieces rather than something you can actually interact with. We were impressed with the graphics and atmosphere, and I can't wait to dig into this deeper...

The first game of tonight's onslaught that we checked out is Mega Dead Pixel, a free to play avoidance game of sorts from Chillingo. The premise is a little weird, as you play as a pixel sliding down the screen and you've got to graze black pixel art to color it. After doing this enough times in a row, you turn into a mega pixel and can blast away loads of the dark pixels. It's a little basic at first, but maybe it improves as you get unlocking things...

I feel like way too often we find ourselves saying, "Oh, it's another one of these." That's a phrase that's absolutely impossible for anyone to utter when referring to Rollabear. Basically, you play as a bear, in a laundromat, who crawls into dryers to be teleported to the woods where you fling yourself with a slingshot, pick up fish that allow you to time travel, and then finally bowl into lumberjacks set up like bowling pins. It's like someone sat down with a super-creative five year old and asked, "OK, what game should we make," and then they executed on it 100%. I... Yeah. It's crazy...

Random Runners is exactly the kind of thing we've been talking about a lot in videos and on the podcast lately. Sure, it's a good runner, but in late 2013 with the crazy amount of runners on the App Store, is it enough to just be "good?" Either way, if you're wild about Ravenous's other games in the Random series, chances are you'll dig this one too...

I knew this game was something special when I saw the screenshots, and after a quick play through of the first "Gothic" level pack of the game, I'm totally sold. We don't spend much time on it in the video, as us silently reading would be pretty boring, but the way the game weaves actual gameplay with the history of typography is ultra-cool. Definitely, definitely give this one a look...

This is a weird one, because it plays very similarly to PikPok's Into the Dead [Free] which is another highly atmospheric first-person runner. The main difference here is that this game has mummies. Is that worth a $1.99 premium over Into the Dead? Hard to say, I guess it depends how much you hate zombies and how much you love Egyptian stuff...

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